Arsenal Risk Losing Serge Gnabry After Lost Year

Arsenal have provided Serge Gnabry with a nightmarish return to action after his knee injury. Will he ever recover from it all?

With the mass of talents that Arsenal have handy, it makes sense that every so often, someone is going to slip through the cracks. Arsenal produce and sign more youth talents then a senior club can ever provide enough spots for. They also rarely mismanage that youth talent. However, it appears that they may have done just that with the lost year that Serge Gnabry is in the midst of.

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This was a crucial year for Serge Gnabry. Fresh off a serious injury, he needed to bounce back and establish some relevance for himself but a poorly constructed loan move has left him living in a hole for the entire season.

Gnabry broke into the Arsenal first team two years ago and figured to be competing for a spot on the Arsenal senior squad at a very ripe age. He tallied his first Arsenal goal at just 18 years of age and it was very apparent that Arsenal had a fantastic talent ready and waiting to be given a shot.

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However, a debilitating knee injury knocked Gnabry out for an entire year and upon his return, Arsenal was a much stronger team and he was sent out on loan to West Brom. At first, it seemed like a good idea. Send our class young winger to a lower-tier EPL side and let him stretch his legs.

Well, Tony Pulis had other plans for his Baggies squad as Gnabry has made just one appearance for 12 minutes with the mid-table outfit. Frustratingly, Arsenal have not ended the loan, meaning that he will remain with the Baggies until the end of the year.

At that point, he will have wasted one whole season drudging away in the West Brom reserves when he should have been either called back and re-loaned or put in the U21 side with his future team mates.

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Arsenal’s mantra of maintaining complete faith in their players has run a little askew here with Serge Gnabry. While the lesson that Arsene Wenger is trying to impart is obvious – adapt and overcome – such a lesson seems minuscule when compared to an entire year’s worth of development. Learning to adapt and overcome could just have easily been learned when he is fighting for a first team spot – something he has already had to do.

It’s all a bit of a cluster. Gnabry was one of Arsenal’s premier talents and Pulis has been harping on him all year. While the Baggies’ manager has no obligation to start Gnabry for Arsenal’s sake, the fact that he only allowed him 12 minutes before dropping him down a hole is almost as egregious as Wenger not pulling him back from loan when clearly the Baggies have no use for him.

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Serge Gnabry is going to require serious mental strength to not let this episode shake his confidence in his own skill as well as his confidence in Arsenal. Arsenal have bumbled this entire situation and they may live to regret it if Gnabry cannot rediscover his confidence or if he becomes so disenchanted with the club that he opts for leaving.